De Palestijn van Dubai

Austin Powers does Dubai?

Israeli pride and satisfaction with the Dubai assassination is beginning to oxidise. It is a partly a question of distaste. For many here the operation was too Austin Powers not enough James Bond. The cartoon on the front page of Haaretz newspaper for instance has Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking spy chief Meir Dagan why several of the assassin suspects all have the same pair of cheap fancy dress glasses?

Then there’s the female suspect’s collection of brown and blonde wigs? A bit passé for a twenty first century spy hit surely? Don’t even talk to wincing Israelis about the in-the-toilet-out-the-toilet routine in the CCTV footage as one suspect goes enters the closet bald and comes out in a wig, and….yes, those glasses.

More seriously Israelis are perturbed by the fact this happened at all in a hotel bristling with more CCTV than a Hatton Garden jewellers. An Israeli journalist who flew to Dubai shortly afterwards tells me the first thing he noticed were the profusion of cameras there. So the hit team would have too.

Whoever did it knew what they were getting into didn’t they?

But most troubling for Israelis are the forged passports. They do not like the spectacle of fellow citizens being put through the emotional wringer quite apart from the paper trail this seems to lead to Mossad’s back door. If it was Mossad, that is. The amateur quality of the operation has spawned a number of theories about the involvement or non involvement of Israel’s shadowy spy agency.

– A) This was too clumsy and amateur to be Mossad. Someone else must have done it. The theory is being put about mainly by ex Mossad people.
– B) It was Mossad being deliberately clumsy, to make it look like it could not have been Mossad, when it actually it really was, if get my drift.
– C) It was Mossad being deliberately high profile and brazen about it. To prove a point. That they can carry this kind of operation out even in a closely watched hotel and do not give a damn about the consequences.